Saturday, February 04, 2017

This Space For Rent

There aren't ads on this page. Not yet, anyway. Over the past few months, I have struggled with the idea of how to provide more traffic to my little corner of Al Gore's Internet. Not because I am tremendously interested in selling you all aluminum siding or its environmentally conscious counterpart, solar panels. Instead, I am consumed with the notion that if I were to find a way to coerce people to click on my link, then I wouldn't have that feeling that I am living in an echo chamber.
You remember back in November, where all of us self-absorbed snowflakes looked out our windows and stopped seeing that reflection of ourselves but instead began to see the sea of red baseball caps with "Make America Great Again" stitched into them? Since then, I haven't stopped rambling on here about how things would be so much better if only everyone would see things my way. Even if that way happens to be a little convoluted and hard to track at times. Mostly, it rings pretty true to your standard bleeding-heart-liberal song and dance that I have spouted since I was in sixth grade, trying to figure out how we could impeach Nixon. I wrote poems and drew cartoons. A few of them were published in my Columbine Elementary's collection of student art and writing. I received a lot of praise and attaboys at the time. It was great for my pre-pubescent self-esteem. I figured my life would therefore be a series of such accolades as a response to my ever-expanding literary prowess.
That's not exactly what happened. I am truly gratified that I frequently enter into conversation with family and friends who tell me that they loved that blog I wrote about this or that. Gratifying, and since I don't need the same kind of reassurance I did when I was twelve, I get by. And yet, I still yearn for those moments when a comment appears in my email from a total stranger who had heard that this was the place to find truth. Or something like it.
Or maybe I could be introduced to someone and over the course of the moments we shared, I offer up my blogging as one of my character attributes, to which that person might respond, "Oh, you're the guy who writes that? Thank you for keeping it real."
Or something less affected than that. Do I think that putting ads on this page would make it more likely for that kind of interaction to take place? Not really. It's in my imagination, the place where all those ideas that you read when you stop by come from. Putting a commercial to the left of my words would probably put some of my potential audience off, and even worse it could distract them for their main purpose: soaking up all the wit and wisdom for which you stopped by here in the first place.
So I'll have to find another way to bring in the converts.
Please stand by.